Mac Mini with MESA 7i76E

Hi Folks,

Been searching to see if anybody has asked the question before but not found anything...

Has anybody tried an Intel Mac Mini running Debian/LinuxCNC?

I've got a couple spare (circa 2009 so not able to run the latest few versions of Mac OS X) which are Core2 Duo. They've got a gigabit port onboard and have built in WiFi (or could use a USB Ethernet port).

Not sure if will have enough grunt, but seems a waste them sitting here doing nothing...

Thanks

Did this investigation come to a conclusion? A MacMini with ethernet MESA sounds like a nice small little setup.

I've been swamped recently, but it's on the todo list. I'd rather not have to buy a couple of embedded PC's if a MacMini will do the job, so is something I'll get to.

Interested if anybody else has had any experiences running on a Mac?

I've tried running LinuxCNC inside VM images (for config development) and had a good experience so far. I've struggled with the GTK UI editor in OS X (there's a native editor that runs well, but had issues loading the LinuxCNC specific libraries).

I had an older (circa 2009) iMac Core2Duo working on Linux Mint 18.1 with RT kernel and a RIP install of LinuxCNC. Latency tests showed it would have been ok for an ethernet MESA. I didnt pursue it further as I got some cheap Dell Optiplex machines with parallel ports. And at the moment for the wee mill I’m looking at converting the speeds from parallel port will be fine. I then repurposed the iMac to be the shop general use computer.

just tried with a mac mini i5 5,1 with 2 gig ram... the max jitter for servo thread was 77,021 and base thread was 54,994. needing it to be around 15,000-20,000ms... or even 30,000-50,000 ms... for ok results. this mac mini doesn't seem to be a good candidate for linuxcnc. I wonder if there is a Mac Mini that would be good enough?

Oh! Really! Great! That’s good to know!

120volts wrote:

Oh! Really! Great! That’s good to know!

I'm sure 77k is way better than my PC with 7i76e